Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen

Karl jumps in with a marvelous passage from Truong's Book of Salt, in which Binh, Gertrude Stein's and Alice B. Tokas's Vietnamese cook, describes with confidence the material culture in which they all lived, ranging from cigars to naughty postcards to the type of devotion the Mesdames had for each other and the types of kitchens in which Binh toiled. This introduces the main points of Karl's dissertation-turned-book, that the rise of consumer capitalism produced uneven economic, political and racial conditions upon which Western modernist production and our perceptions of modernism rest. Karl continues by examining the desires of Rhys's marketplace culture, of the consumerism and imperialism enmeshed in Woolf's The Voyage Out and Mrs. Dalloway, of the experiments of Stain and Sylvia Beach into was is actually and enterprising modernism, and the web of consumerism and race woven in Nella Larsen's Quicksand. This is both elegant and exciting. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Alissa G. Karl is an Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York, Brockport, where she teaches and researches transatlantic twentieth century literature. Her work has also appeared in American Literature and The International Journal of Cultural Studies.